Don’t regulate us like the telco-as-dumb-pipe model, Zuckerberg proposed on Saturday, even though that’s once how he wanted us all to view the platform: as just a technology platform that dished up trash without actually being responsible for creating it. No, not like a telco, but not like the newspaper model, either, he said.
Nobody ever really swallowed what Facebook once offered as a magic pill to try to ward off culpability for what it publishes – as in, that “we’re just a technology platform” mantra. Facebook gave up trying to hide behind that one long ago, somewhere amongst the outrage sparked by extremist content, fake news and misleading political advertising. So now, Facebook has taken a different tack. During a Q&A session at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook isn’t the passive set of telco pipes he once insisted it was, but nor is it like a regular media outlet that produces news. Rather, it’s a hybrid, he said, and should be treated as such.
Reuters quoted Zuckerberg’s remarks as he spoke to global leaders and security chiefs, suggesting that regulators treat Facebook like something between a newspaper and a telco :
I do think that there should be regulation on harmful content …there’s a question about which framework you use for this. Right now there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries – there’s like newspapers and existing media, and then there’s the telco-type model, which is ‘the data just flows through you’, but you’re not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line. I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between.
